I agree with the general sentiment of this post that Adalo is extremely promising but not quite ready for primetime. IMO there is a different MVP feature set that is lacking however:
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States: not a blocker given current hacks with visibility
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Reusable elements: will be addressed inherently by component marketplace (assuming they add a “private” option). That is already in progress.
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Custom Actions: agree this would be nice but I would argue having a notification type=webhook would allow you to solve this + enable other flexibility/integration so would be a bigger win.
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For GDPR compliance: agreed they need servers in different datacenters not just for this reason but also for usability. The app is almost unusable in Asia right now.
IMO there are two missing from this list that are essential to enable true production usage:
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Currently there is no bulletproof way to do development safely. It requires cowboy coding on the live app and risking breaking things for paying customers or a tapdance forking a sandbox app and manually porting changes/data to promote features live. Solving that is something that I believe should take high priority to “cross the chasm” of seriousness for this to become a tool that companies can use.
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The data in Adalo collections is trapped and not queryable via external services. Unless you had the foresight to house your data in an external db like Airtable and use the external collections feature (and then you open a whole other can of worms in terms of degraded functionality) it is impossible to run any business logic on the database that’s not triggered by the user’s actions. And there is no simple way to mirror the collections to external sources (plus you’d be getting messy then anyways violating DRY).
That said, there is some real promise here to bundle all of the above once it exists and roll it under the Business Plan pricing tier to make some real differentiation to justify that plan type. Currently it’s just 20GB vs. 5GB of storage and I can’t imagine many people are exhausting their 5GB cap and moving to the Business Plan. Paying for multiple points of presence for global performance, compliance, proper dev/test/stage/prod workflows, access to pre-built components, ability to expose collections via API to external services… these are all features I believe serious folks will need and would be willing to pay for. The $50/mo plan is how you build your MVP, gain initial traction then the $200/mo plan is how you host it in production.
Anyways, I am facing the choice now whether to stop everything and port our entire data model to AirTable, re-architect the app using external collections vs. waiting for the capability to expose Adalo data collections to external services. And as long as I have to do all the work to move the db I’m admittedly investigating Bubble to be completely transparent. Leaning towards moving data to AirTable and trying to stay with Adalo via external collections so I can salvage much of the work that’s already been done. Tradeoffs everywhere but in all Adalo feels like a more nimble tool than Bubble and has more long-term promise so it’s a question of how soon they can close the gaps on the features that preclude it from being ready for primetime.
Far be it from me to suggest business advice to Adalo but given how much promise the tool has and how hot the space is, could you make the case to raise another tranche of investment and with that $$ put a team on building out these features which would justify the Business plan?
Anyways happy overall and thrilled with the agility this tool enables but agreed that we’re all gambling alongside Adalo in building ontop of this platform. We’ve jumped out of the plane together and are knitting our respective harnesses (apps) while they’re knitting the parachute (platform) hoping both come together before the ground arrives 